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The stats are infamous. The only group of people more despised in America than Congress are the media. Scapegoated by those on all sides of the political spectrum, the media is probably always going to take a lot of heat, mostly because nobody likes to hear the truth about themselves, and despite claims of fake news, the grand majority of what the media reports is indeed the truth. But when they get it wrong — or worse, when they sensationalize or mislead — the media does a grave disservice to the people they’re supposed to serve. Which is of course why the movies always seem to like to make movies that show the media doing exactly that. Bad Media movies show reporters, editors, producers, and others up the chain in a venal chase for ratings and eyeballs. They also tend to be sensational movies because who doesn’t love a movie where our national institutions turn out to be devoid of morals or ethics? We’ve been making movies like that about the government for YEARS.
The great 2016 movie Christine takes a look at local news media from the inside, but it’s not about its impact on society but rather its impact on an indivudual. Based on the real-life story of Christine Chubbuck, a local news reporter in Florida in the 1970s, Christine is about how the chase for ratings-friendly stories steadily aided in the breakdown of this woman (played with tremendous depth by Rebecca Hall), who only wanted to do good work and was faced again and again with the sensationalist demands of the news media.
Christine is as good a movie as you’re going to find on streaming right now — it’s been recently added to Netflix — and you should definitely seek it out. But along with it, here are 5 movies that show the media in a very bad light.
'Network' (1976)
Sidney Lumet’s scorching portrait of a media gone mad is probably still the most prophetic film on record about where America was headed and where we all ended up. At the New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film “brilliantly, cruelly funny” though he (as well as other critics like Roger Ebert) looked at the film somewhat askew for just how outrageous it was. Even they couldn’t have envisioned a future full of reality television personalities, extreme corporate consolidation of media companies, Fox News, Donald Trump, Jon Stewart, Keith Olberman, InfoWars, and everything else that the last 40 years of media has brought us.
'Nightcrawler' (2014)
Nearly 40 years after Network, we got Nightcrawler, which took the amoral ethos of a local newsroom and put it in the persona of Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose self-made photojournalism career is presented as the personification of all that’s wrong with the media today. Obsessed with building himself up as a brand unto himself, Bloom maniacally chases down “news” (really anything bloody enough to demand attention) and bulldozes his stuff onto air. It’s a manifest-destiny vision of news as an area where our attention is the currency that allows sociopaths to rise up in the world, and Gyllenhaal is the gaunt-faced personification of our worst instincts.
'To Die For' (1995)
Often, dark depictions of the media settle on its unique ability to create monsters out of regular people simply by taking driven, ambitious people and giving them a taste of the spotlight. Such was the case in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, where Nicole Kidman plays Suzanne Stone, a local weather reporter whose single-minded ambition to become a Diane Sawyer-level news anchor begins with the kinds of things we take as a given — marrying for power; manipulating co-workers — and then moves into more extreme, tabloid-friendly directions as Suzanne schemes to seduce a high-school student (Joaquin Phoenix) and convince him to murder her husband (Matt Dillon). See it for its brutal depiction of the media as accomplice to murder but also for Kidman’s dynamite breakthrough performance.
'Shattered Glass' (2003)
The real-life story of disgraced New Republic reporter Stephen Glass, who fabricated dozens of stories over his young career and was subsequently exposed in spectacular fashion, is brought to wildly compelling life in this 2003 film. Featuring Hayden Christensen as Glass (he’s honestly very good!) and an all-star supporting cast that includes Hank Azaria, Peter Sarsgaard, Rosario Dawson, Chloe Sevigny, and Melanie Lynskey, the film is perhaps borderline for a list of movies that make the media look bad. Yes, Glass goes down in flames, and we’re left wondering about the merits of a media industry where a fraud could rise so high based only on a cult of personality, but there is also heroism in the ideals of the editor (Chuck Lane, played by Sarsgaard) who takes him down.
'Natural Born Killers' (1994)
It can’t come as a shock that one of the most sensational portraits of the media would come from Oliver Stone. It also couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time, as 1994 (the year the O.J. Simpson murders happened) was the flashpoint for the media willingly sensationalizing brutal crime and murder in order to make TV stars out of the participants. Stone’s film focuses on serial killers Mickey and Mallory Knox (Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis) whose murder spree makes them massive stars; Robert Downey Jr. plays the tabloid TV reporter who hitches his career to their star … with particularly effed-up results.
